About

Clearskypix is a website and a blog about astrophotography.

My name is Francois; I've been an amateur astronomer since 1988.

In 2004, I purchased my first astrophotography equipment and in 2008, I built my own observatory. Since then, I cannot count the number of hours I have spent building, learning and trying. It truly as been a humbling experience that I want to share through these pages and I sincerely hope it will continue for a lifetime.

On Clearskypix, you will find:

A series of articles (blog posts) describing my adventures and misadventures as an astronomical Imager
A portfolio of images acquired and processed by me
Information about my equipment and observatory (click the tiles on the right)
Information about my image acquisition and processing techniques
Useful astrophotography resources

Image Portfolio

Articles

Making beautiful astronomical images of deep sky objects like nebulas and galaxies is not easy. One of the challenge lies in being able to ensure the telescope is precisely following the movement of the sky caused by earth’s rotation. First, one need a telescope mount that is of sufficient precision. Secondly, the mount needs to be properly

It has been a long time since I’ve written on the blog. Quite busy with the family and other projects. In early august, I was able to complete the HyperTune of the Celestron CGEM. Re-greasing and re-assembly of the DEC axis went without a glitch. The videos from Ed Thomas at Deep Space Products are

With the intention of improving the autoguiding performance (especially in RA) of my Celestron CGEM mount, I have initiated the process of “Hyper-Tuning” it. A few months ago, I purchased a partial kit from Ed Thomas at Deep Space Products to help the process. What I ordered was: – DVD step-by-step video on how to HyperTune® your mount

For those of you who have been following my blog, you know that have been experiencing difficulties with being able to capture images with nice round and tight stars (i.e. sharper images). There are many factors that can contribute to image quality. If one or more of these factors are present in your setup. You can end up